Quoting for work
You should not have to guess whether an enquiry is a real job.
Enquiries used to be easy to sort. The ones that were not real read like nothing a person would write. Now a bid request arrives that is vague about the site and the scope, uses phrasing nobody uses out loud, and is otherwise indistinguishable from somebody who wants the job doing.
So you read it twice, and you are still not sure. Ignoring it might cost you the work. Answering it costs you an hour and a quote that goes nowhere.
Illustrative.
Why a filter is a risk for you
One missed quote costs more than a year of noise
For most businesses a spam filter that is slightly too keen is an annoyance. For you it is a job that went to somebody else, and you never find out it happened. That is the reason most people in your position never install one at all, and it is the right instinct.
So the trade is made the other way round here. When we are not sure, you get it. When anything on our side fails, everything is delivered rather than held. And nothing we hold is deleted — it sits in your account, readable, one click from your mailbox, for as long as your retention window says.
You also set how suspicious a message has to be before it is held at all, and for a quoting business the sensible setting is the cautious one. Some noise still reaches you. That is the trade, and it is the one worth making.
The one you did answer
A quote that never arrives looks exactly like a quote that was ignored
Plenty of form plugins send you the enquiry from your own website's address rather than from the person who wrote it. Press reply, write the price, send — and it lands in a mailbox on your own server that nobody reads.
We find the sender's real address — in the Reply-To header, in the body of the message, or in the From header — and set it as the address your reply goes to. Every delivered enquiry says which of the three it came from. When none of them yields an address, the message is marked rather than handed to you looking answerable.
Watch it for a week before it holds anything
Change one field in your form settings and everything is delivered exactly as it is today. We check each enquiry and record what we would have held, and you decide at the end of the week whether we were right about your mail. Putting your own address back is the same one field.